Can someone explain the Federalist Papers in today’s English?? Why are they so important when they seem to be anti-democracy (in favor or republics) and anti the Bill of Rights?
Take-home exams are a pain, aren’t they?
All I can say offhand is that the Bill of Rights didn’t yet exist, and the Founding Fathers were anything but wild champions of popular democracy.
As the terms are used now, a republic is a form of democracy. It is in opposition to direct democracy, which is a much less successful form of democracy.
No, this isn’t what you learned in Middle School Civics. Middle School Civics isn’t the authority on the English language and I particularly hate how it has created a bunch of illiterate pedants who want to destroy the utility of the word democracy.
Sadly, it seems to be anear-universal phenomenon. For some reason, the combination of democracy in any serious form and public education produces a great many fools who never bother to learn anything of substance.
The founding fathers feared the masses as much as the king.
There’s an old question, “What’s wrong with majority rule,”? The answer is of course, “what if the majority is wrong”?
Emphasis in the old days was on conformity not individual freedoms. Of course the founding fathers were also acutely aware they themselves were “traitors” to their mother country (the British crown) so they had to balance, the position it is OK to fight tyranny while at the same time saying “it’s not OK to rebel.” In other words, you can fight true tyranny but not just something that doesn’t go your way but is basically fair.
So, I guess nobody can really explain the papers in everyday terminology? BTW, I’m not student taking an exam. I’m 61 and retired and am just curious.
What do you mean? You want us to go paper-by-paper and translate the principles into contemporary language? Do you realize how many Federalist papers there are? How about this: pick one of the short ones you’re interested in and we can walk through it bit-by-bit.
I know they defend the electoral college system as a means of preventing election fraud, as well as a means to insure those actually voting are likely to be aware of the current issues facing the country. It’s been a while since I’ve visited that subject.
Perhaps I misunderstood the question to be about content.
If you just want to know why they are important, the answer is simple. They are both crucial historical documents and interesting political treatises.
As historical documents, they are contemporary accounts of what was meant by various (often vague) constitutional provisions. They reflect the framework of debate that was happening at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, which is important to understanding and interpreting the current document.
And as political treatises, they set up and examine a lot of issues that are still very relevant: what to do about interest groups, how to deal with minority political positions, etc.
If the conclusion doesn’t work, maybe the premise is wrong. And yours is.
You can’t read the Federalist Papers and think that they were anti-democracy. It’s true that the word democracy meant something different at the time, and that nobody thought that a nation as large and heterogeneous as the U.S. could form a stable democracy. The Greek city-states were their idea, and ideal, of democracy and those were tiny, both in physical area and in the total number of voting citizens. The American colonies were nothing like that.
Instead, the favored word was a Republic, again on the classical ideal of the Roman Republic, before the Empire told hold and slowly destroyed the country.
But the ideals that they put into the notion of republic are the same ideals that we today put into the notion of democracy. It has to be, because they’re the same thing, just that one word eventually supplanted the other.
Nor were Hamilton and Madison (Jay didn’t write enough) against the contents of a bill of rights. Just the opposite. They assumed that the protections guaranteed were so self-evident that they didn’t need to be formalized into language that would allow loopholes and that would precipitate yet another bruising round of debate. The adoption of the Constitution as it stood was so contentious that the Federalist Papers needed to be written - dozens of them, over a lengthy period - just to try to convince the electorate that it was a good thing. Others were writing against the adoption of the Constitution at the same time. Huge battles occurred in every State legislature. Go through all that again right away? The rifts might never heal.
You have to look beyond the language of the day to get to the underlying ideals of what they expected the resulting government to look like. They didn’t get it all right - how could they? But the writing laid out the reasoning behind the systems - a series of compromises, remember - that the Constitution created. That would be a more powerful federal government - a worrisome point for almost everybody; a legislative branch that had the protection of time to get work done without being voted out of office - most state officials were elected annually; a standing army and navy - when historically those were used against the people rather than for them; and all the other prescient innovations of the Constitution.
The Papers are difficult reading today and they cannot be summarized. They are a very long series of arguments on each aspect of the Constitution. They need time and understanding. To do that right, you have to approach them with the same mindset as with they were written. Thinking that they were anti-democracy isn’t it.
These papers were an argument against the then-current system of government, a loose confederation of independent states. They favored a more central (federal) government as described in the Constitution, which was pending ratification by the states.
I suspect that this is the closest answer, so far, to the actual question of the OP.
The Federalist Papers were a series of commentaries on the proposed new Constitution that were intended to persuade the various state legislatures to ratify the new Constitution, replacing the Articles of Confederation that was the document under which the United States of America originally operated as a country. (Work began on it in 1777, a few months after the Declaration of Independence, but it was not completed and ratified until 1781.)
By 1787, a lot of people recognized that the Articles were not really a successful guideline for the country and a new convention was called to amend them. However, when the convention got under way, they decided to simply start over and write a totally new document. Since the original intent of the convention had been to amend the Articles, not replace them, there was a considerable reluctance among many people to adopt the new Constitution. In addition, the new Constitution provided for a substantially stronger central government–a point feared by many people who were concerned about either giving up states’ powers or coming under a new tyranny.
The Federalist Papers were intended to provide the arguments that allayed the fears of those who saw the Constitution as a power grab while also pointing out the many failures of the Articles. As such, it provides an insight into, (not THE insight or the definitive explanation of) the intentions of the Constitutional convention and is much used to seek out interpretations of some of the murkier phrases that the Constitution employs.
There was actually an opposing series of tracts that argued against the Constitution (and that have been collected under the term Anti-Federalist Papers), but since that side “lost” the debate, they are not studied as often or as thoroughly.
I assume you’re thinking of Federalist No. 84?
The Federalist Papers were written for a political purpose: by supporters of the proposed Constitution, to win support for ratification. That context is important to understand the arguments it advances about a Bill of Rights. The Federalist Papers were politically motivated (not that there’s anything wrong with that 
) and this particular part of the argument was aimed at responding to one of the most important criticisms of the new Constitution.
One of the criticisms levelled at the proposed Constitution was that it lacked a Bill of Rights. Indeed, George Mason, one of the most important Virginia delegates to the Constitutional Convention, opposed the new Constitution for just that reason - in his view, it didn’t protect individual rights. (He was one of the authors of the Virginia Bill of Rights.)
The three authors of the Federalist Papers wrote partly in response to that perspective, and defended the lack of a Bill of Rights. They weren’t disagreeing with the idea that individuals should have rights valid against their government. Their disagreement was on the means to that end - and, as politicians, they advanced arguments on this point that they hoped would sway the people to accept their overall position on ratification.
In Federalist 84, Hamilton argued that since the proposed Federal government would be a government of limited powers, created by the people themselves, it would not have the power to infringe individual rights - that the Constitution would not be interpreted in a way to allow the peoples’ rights to be infringed.
Now, there are problems with that approach in practice, but it doesn’t mean that the writers of the Federalist Papers wanted the government to run roughshod over the rights of citizens. Rather, they argued that the rights of citizens were implicit in the proposed Constitution and that the federal government would not have any power to infringe the rights of citizens.
The importance of the debate continued after the ratification of the Constitution, which led to the First Congress proposing the Bill of Rights. James Madison, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, was a Congressman from Virginia and was influential in the drafting of the proposed amendments. Significantly, the 9th and 10th Amendments carry forward the concept that the federal government is a body of limited powers, not able to intrude on the rights of the people, which is strongly reminiscent of the argument that Hamilton advanced in Federalist 84:
Also the people writing the Federalist Papers had a big role in writing the Constitution. Madison is given credit for being the Constitution’s biggest influence, so what he had to say in defense of the document is very important in terms of understanding the rational behind each provision.
They defend and explain almost the whole document throughout all the Papers.
No one has mentioned this yet, but if you want to read one Federalist Paper, to get a sense of their importance, then you should have a sit down with Federalist #10. It is probably the best piece of government philosophy to come out of the western hemisphere.
by the way, illinois girl, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board! hope you find it fun and informative!
please don’t be put off by the initial reactions to your post - this time of year, we often get requests from students for help with homework, and it’s one of the principles of this Board that we don’t do other people’s homework for them. Genuine curiosity and a quest for knowledge for its own sake, on the other hand, are warmly welcomed.
Hope you find the replies so far to be helpful. If you have more questions, framing them as a specific question rather than a general “What’s up with the Federalist Papers?” can help us to answer them.
The 18th century language? I’m afraid you just have to get used to that.
And, I second Lakai’s recommendation that you start with Federalist No. 10.
The Papers weren’t anti- anything really. They take a historical look at various systems of government through time, Grecian city states, Rome, England, pure democracy, monarchy, republic, and weigh the pros and cons of each, and then goes on to say why the form of Republic proposed in the Constitution will succeed.
Thank you - I think you gave me clearest answer.